First, the possibility of the natural experiment depended on a prior and larger economic experiment. The attempt to test the impact of property ownership on the propensity to work was possible because Peru had become the site of a large-scale neoliberal experiment in the formalization of property rights and the formation of entrepreneurial subjects. Millions of citizens and hundreds of thousands of households had been drawn into an experiment designed to demonstrate that a simple procedure for acquiring property rights would lead to a transformation in economic action and a dramatic improvement in well-being.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1976